Advancing medicine through real world data

Anyone impacted by chronic/rare diseases knows the frustration of dealing with dispersed healthcare records. Dozens of calls and faxes to various clinics return unstructured information that patients must make sense of on their own. Meanwhile, treatments are hampered because researchers have lots of data in controlled settings like clinical trials but lack good visibility on patient journeys in the real world. The available patient data today, mostly pulled from EMRs without patient consent, is incomplete longitudinally and often without structure, leading to missed insights in matching patients to the right treatments early.

Fortunately, one team has created a novel approach to tackling both challenges. 

In 2014, Noga Leviner and Troy Astorino co-founded PicnicHealth to help patients take complete ownership of their health and advance medicine as a result. It was borne out of Noga's personal frustration when she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Today, I'm thrilled to share that Felicis has joined PicnicHealth's mission by leading their $25M Series B round.

PicnicHealth provides the first fully patient-consented, uniquely rich real world dataset for research. They extract information no one else can by breaking an impossible ML problem into a series of more tractable ML problems augmented with a human in the loop (if this sounds exciting to you, they're hiring!). Together with a number of the world's biggest players in life sciences research, like Roche and Genentech, they're working on a growing list of conditions ranging from MS and IBD to Huntington’s disease and Hemophilia. 

Reinventing a massive industry while creating a dramatically better consumer experience requires clarity, grit and an Ocean's 11 team -- all of which PicnicHealth has in spades. We're thrilled to partner with them to bring the platform to more patients, disease areas and research partners so we can change the future of health for the better.